Give that kid a break, she already speaks two languages and you want her to force to learn a third already? How many do you speak?

You do realize that a lot of non-native english speaker read Slashdot?

This is encouraging, not forcing. So I'm all for it. If a friend of my father hadn't introduced me to programming at age of 7, I would have missed something that soon turned into a passion and is now my day job. That was the most important event in my life, second only to my birth. You have to give kids the chance to try something to see whether they like it, like chemistry or electronic kits. If they like it, great! If not, so what.

Interesting. The linked Wikipedia article talks about speaking and reading, and the later is indeed way harder to learn in asian languages. It would be interesting to see how this list turned out if you ignore the reading/writing. In Japanese, you can also write everything in Hiragana, for example; that's easy to learn but not as exact due to homonyms, words that are pronounced the same but have different meaning. These words usually have different Kanji, so you can distinguish them when using Kanji but not when using Hiragana. My experience is this: I'm German, have learned English and French at school (though I can't talk the later now) and have learned Japanese in an evening school (though I can't speak that one either now). I found that while Japanese has a totally different grammar than the others, it was easier to learn due to the grammar being not as complex and not having so many exceptions like european languages usually do (irregular verbs and the like). But it seems I'm the exception here.

You didn't read the posting at all, only the title, didn't you?

I second this. There's going to be a huge demand for Westerners who can talk and even write Chinese. The market is large and growing fast. An alternative to that would be Russian. But beware, although it's easier to learn the cyrillic alphabet than chinese characters, the language itself seems to actually be harder to learn from what I've heard so far: it seems to have lots of irregularities. A former colleague, who's Russian, said that after living a few years in Germany and speaking almost no Russian during that time had him forget a few of those irregularities in the Russian language and his Russian friends immediately noticed when he visited them. My father wanted to learn Russian and gave up because there are words that have flections that don't seem to be related to the original word at all and you need to learn a lot of vocabulary due to the grammar. By contrast, AFAIK the chinese grammar is "odd" for westerners but not hard to learn.

I find it a bit strange that these trading systems don't seem to use some kind of identification (like signed certificates). How is it possible that some system did these things and the stock exchange doesn't immediately know whose system this was? This sounds like a disaster waiting to happen.

The law-blogger Florian Müller has a more in-depth explanation of this issue. He especially explains how this is not an US court interfering with a German court's decision. The US court merely prevents Motorola from enforcing the injunction, should it win it.